Snapshots

— Wintry weather. At last. I took a long walk this morning as the sun was coming up, and I was loving the icy wind, the cold clear colors in the sky, my fabulous green Marc Jacobs fuzzy gloves. (Ahem)

— I am now tearing along through Underworld, by Don DeLillo, after a couple month’s break. (Not really my style, with a book I like. Especially fiction.) But Underworld is so big, so dense – and the chapters are all pretty self-contained – there’s not an unbroken narrative – I’ve found it easy to put it down, pick it back up. I’m now in the kaleidoscopic section called “Better Living Through Better Chemistry” – which is subtitled something like “Fragments Public and Private – 1950s – 1970s”. It’s hypnotic. We’ve got a series of anecdotes – showing Lenny Bruce in action in various comedy clubs – during the tense week of the Cuban missile crisis. We’ve got a couple of anecdotes about J. Edgar Hoover going to Truman Capote’s famous black & white ball in Nov. 1966. We’ve got one of the main characters in the book driving his girlfriend over the border to get an abortion in 1957. A bleak and surreal scene. Our main character is thinking about unlived lives, basically. The unlived lives of the aborted. But meanwhile, he’s sitting in the waiting room of this dingy weird office over the border in Mexico, with indigenous art on the walls, and the smells of cooking coming from an apartment above, and his girlfriend is getting an abortion, and … he sits there, thinking about unlived lives. We’ve got a weird anecdote (which I cannot figure out yet, why it’s there, what it means) about the mother of one of the other characters in the book (but this other character is so incidental, so small, that I had to look back through the book to even figure out who he was) – anyway, this mother is OBSESSED with jello molds. So we go through her jello process, on a summer day in the late 1950s, she’s in her perfect kitchn, making 5,000 jello molds … it’s a CREEPY chapter. I have no idea yet what that one is about. There are many more … “fragments public and private”. It’s adding up to a collage, a bit mysterious, not a complete picture yet. But certainly riveting reading. Especially because all of this stuff is well-known history to me, due to my interests, my nationality, my generation. Great stuff.

— My parents are here this weekend. We’re going out to dinner tonight at a little place in the Village (one of my favorite joints on the island of Manhattan – love it. It has about 7 tables, a wonderful waitstaff, an incredible wine list … and it’s chilled out, and yet romantic … they don’t rush you out, even though there are only 7 tables). Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to that time with the parents. They’re also sleeping over tonight in my broom-closet-sized apartment, so that should be interesting.

— I am also continuing on with the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I am still in the early years, when they are all in Europe (the Adams’ are now in England, Jefferson still back in Paris) and exchanging letters – many of them in code. Great stuff. They’re very prosaic – not like the philosophical flights-of-fancy letters at the ends of their lives, when they were pretty much off the public stage, and in the process of contemplating mortality. These early letters are all: Please have Dr. Franklin sign this so and so and send it back to me…The situation here is quite uncomfortable … Prosaic diplomatic stuff. Still outrageously fascinating. I find it VERY interesting, too, to see the entire change in demeanor when Jefferson writes to Abigail as opposed to John. Perhaps not all that surprising, but still very interesting. Abigail and Jefferson had a very special bond … and it was many many many years later, when Jefferson was trying to heal the relationship with her (in his own aloof strange way) – that she wrote the immortal words: “Faithfull are the Wounds of a Friend.” Jaysus, Abigail, you are correct on that one. There is nothing so FAITHFUL as the wound given to you by a FRIEND. That shit lasts forever. So to read the BEGINNINGS of this special relationship, in the exchange of letters when she was in London and he in Paris, is beautiful. Jefferson seems like a completely different man when writing to Abigail. Open, teasing, emotional … it’s quite astonishing. In comparison to the bluntness of his other letters. It’s great stuff. I’m tearing through it.

— I find this photograph, especially the eyeballs, intensely amusing.